Senior Site Reliability Engineer

About the Role:

Planet designs, builds, and operates the largest constellation of imaging satellites in history. This constellation delivers an unprecedented dataset of empirical information via a revolutionary cloud-based platform to authoritative figures in commercial, environmental, and humanitarian sectors. We are both a space company and data company rolled into one.

In this role, you will join Planet's Direct Access Service Infrastructure team, directly contributing to our next-generation Constellation as a Service platform. This platform represents a major new offering to our customers that goes beyond traditional cloud-based platforms and supports on-premises deployments.

You will be responsible for building, deploying, and operating critical compute software that supports end-to-end imaging operations within customer on-premises and/or cloud environments. You will use your understanding of internal compute requirements as well as customers' environmental-specific constraints to help design, implement, and support a robust system for reproducible deployments across operating environments, to guarantee the reliability, scalability, and availability of our services. To do this, you will partner closely with cross-functional engineering teams to enable and empower the integration of software solutions and the troubleshooting of distributed systems.

This is a full-time, remote position based in the United States or Canada. If located near an office, you are expected to work from that office 3 days per week.

Impact You'll Own:

Build and deploy computing services and infrastructure in customer environments for a next-generation satellite operations and image processing end-to-end platform

Operate in a high-impact, tight knit team to architect novel systems for air-gapped deployments at scale

Clarify and surface requirements from ambiguous use cases defined by cross-functional stakeholders, including internal users and external customers

Responsible for operations such as deployments, service orchestration, and documentation for cross platform stakeholders

Scale architecture while ensuring availability of services

Improve reliability and scalability by resolving edge cases, studying failure modes, and writing tests

Participate in on-call rotations to ensure operational excellence

What You Bring:

6+ years of experience building services that leverage cloud-native infrastructure and tooling

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or similar

Experience deploying and maintaining bare-metal and cloud kubernetes through tools such as Talos, RKE2, Proxmox, or k3s

Proficiency with Terraform, Ansible, Helm, Kustomize, and/or similar IaC / GitOps tooling

Experience with CI/CD tooling, such as Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD, Argo CD, or CircleCI

Experience successfully building, releasing, and supporting highly available, consistently performant services

Knowledge of hardware and network level implications of on-prem compute

Experience with platform optimization, particularly resource optimization, management, and cluster tuning in a constrained environment

Ability to observe and troubleshoot distributed systems with tools such as Alloy, Prometheus, Grafana, and OpenTelemetry

Advanced skills in Python, Bash, and other tooling as appropriate to build services and meet product goals

Excellent communication skills and the ability to work through collaboration with cross-functional engineering teams

Experience working with Jira for task management and progress tracking

What Makes You Stand Out:

Experience with CUDA-based GPU programs

Security expertise in sensitive environments, including implementing zero-trust architectures, hardening Kubernetes clusters, conducting security audits, and deploying workloads in air-gapped environments

Application Deadline:

November 11, 2026 by 11:59p / 23:59 CET (Central European Time)

EAR/ITAR Requirements:

This position requires access to export-controlled information, and as such, employment (or hiring of a contractor) is contingent upon the candidate’s ability to access all applicable export-controlled information without additional export licensing being required by the Bureau of Industry and Security and/or the Directorate of Defense Trade Controls.

Benefits While Working at Planet:

These offerings are dependent on employment type and geographical location, based upon applicable law or company policy.

Comprehensive Medical, Dental, and Vision plans

Health Savings Account (HSA) with a company contribution

Generous Paid Time Off in addition to holidays and company-wide days off

16 Weeks of Paid Parental Leave

Wellness Program and Employee Assistance Program (EAP)

Home Office Reimbursement

Monthly Phone and Internet Reimbursement

Tuition Reimbursement and access to LinkedIn Learning

Equity

Commuter Benefits (if local to an office)

Volunteering Paid Time Off

Compensation:

The US base salary range for this full-time position at the commencement of employment is listed below. Additionally, this role might be eligible for discretionary short-term and long-term incentives (bonus and equity). The final salary range is determined by job related experience, skills and location. The range displays our typical hiring range for new hire salaries in US locations only. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for your preferred location during the hiring process.

#LI-REMOTENew York City + California Salary Range

$153,000—$191,300 USD

San Francisco Salary Range

$162,600—$203,200 USD

US National Salary Range

$142,800—$178,500 USD

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